Welcome to this episode of Physician’s Weekly Podcast. My name is Dr Rachel Giles, from Medicom Medical Publishers, in collaboration with Physician’s Weekly.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, stay-at-home orders and other restrictions drastically affected how people lived and worked, resulting in social isolation and economic instability. Not surprisingly, presented at the American Chemical Society which was held Aug. 22-26,, researchers show that some people turned to a variety of drugs for relief. Using wastewater analysis, the team lead by Dr Bikram Subedi identified a spike in consumption of easily abused prescription opioids and anti-anxiety sedatives, while some illicit drug use plummeted, between March and June 2020. Their results showed that consumption of hydrocodone — one of the most abused prescription opioids — spiked by 72% from March to June 2020. The researchers suggest the change was because people had easier access to doctors as they switched to telemedicine appointments. Conversely, the use of illicit stimulants dropped by 16% for methamphetamine and 40% for cocaine. The researchers suggest that travel restrictions limited interstate and international trafficking of these drugs.
These data strongly suggest that there is an unmet need in multidisciplinary telementoring services to reduce opioid use in the outpatient setting. In this episode, Physician’s Weekly’s Senior Editor Martta Kelly interviews Dr. Thomas Delate, a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente, about his study on the value of telementoring services in educating prescribers about chronic pain management, including opioid prescriptions , recently published in Clinical Journal of Pain. I think you will be surprised by the efficacy of this approach.
Also in this episode, we speak with our regular expert contributor with the pseudonym Dr. Medlaw on how physicians how to “knock it out of the park” while giving a deposition in a malpractice case and the key elements in preparing to testify.
But first, we speak with Dr. Bruce Brod, a Professor of Dermatology at University of Pennsylvania, and spokesperson for the America Association of Dermatology, about developments in the treatment and understanding of one of the most common diseases in humans, eczema or atopic dermatitis, which affects up to 30% of children.
That’s all the time we have for this week’s podcast. Thanks for listening, I hope you learned something about telementoring for chronic pain relief, about the pathophysiology of atopic dermatitis, and about the best way to go about testifying in a court of law. Stay safe and stay healthy.
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Thanks for listening!